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COPYRIGHT 2007 American Folklore Society
Recent publications by Robert Springer and Michael Taft have brought renewed attention to the subject of the formula in blues lyrics. This article critiques these works. Drawing insights from the author's fieldwork in the blues tradition, it agrees with Springer that a blues formula can be a half-line, whole line, or couplet unit and suggests that the blues formula should be understood, as Parry and Lord understood the oral epic formula, to be a lexical rather than semantic unit. The author offers a method of structural analysis of highly formulaic blues texts and discusses the relationships of folk blues to commercially recorded blues.
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If 2003 was the "Year of the Blues," according to a proclamation of the United States Senate, then 2006 must have been the Year of the Blues Formula. Early in the year two important publications appeared, Robert Springer's "On the Electronic Trail of Blues Formulas" and Michael Taft's The Blues Lyric Formula.
Springer gets right to the subject at hand in stating that a blues lyric formula can be a two-line unit (as in the rhymed A and B lines of a standard AAB blues stanza), a single line, or a half line. He writes, "I'll use the term formula whatever its length" (2006:165). He does not offer a specific definition of a blues formula but simply adopts the definition of a formula given by Milman Parry and Albert Lord in their studies of oral epic poetry: "a group of words which is regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea" (Lord 1960:30; see also Parry 1971). Using the BLUR electronic database (Blues Lyrics collected at the University of Regensburg), Springer examines in chronological order the variations of four formulas ("It takes a rockin'-chair to rock, a rubber ball to roll,/ Takes the man I love to satisfy my soul"; "I'm standin' here wonderin' will a matchbox hold my clothes"; "I'm goin', I'm goin', your cryin' won't make me stay, / For the more you cry, further you drive me away"; and "Going away to wear you off my mind"). He traces relationships and influences among the variants of these formulas and suggests the motivations of the different singers who used them on commercial recordings in the 1920s and 1930s, painting a portrait of a dynamic blues tradition affected by commercialism.
Taft's study is longer and more ambitious. He calls it "a structural analysis of the formulaic composition of blues lyrics, specifically the blues lyrics recorded by African American singers for pre-World War II commercial recording companies" and states that it is the first "rigorous and detailed exploration of exactly how blues singers used formulas in creating a commercially acceptable form of song." Taft writes, "my intention is to give a step-by-step description of the rules implicit in the formulaic structure of the blues; my goal is to reanimate the discussion of blues lyric structure and to flesh out the intuitions of previous scholars," complaining that "there has been little rigorous structural analysis of blues lyrics" until now and that "the student of blues lyrics has no readily accessible set of theories and methodologies" (2006:2). To remedy this deficiency, Taft relies "on the theories of generative and transformational grammar, first outlined by [Noam] Chomsky, to describe blues formulaic composition," resulting in the discovery of "the compositional rules of blues formulaic structure" and "rules of compositional competence" (2006:4-5).
Using a corpus of the texts of more than two thousand commercially recorded blues sung by more than three hundred and fifty singers, which he has published in a separate volume (Taft 2005), (1) Taft concludes that "whether improvised before the microphone or meticulously written down and memorized, blues lyrics conform to one structural pattern: they are formulaic, and the basic unit of blues composition is the whole-line or half-line formula" (2006:25). (In fact, the vast majority of his formulas are half lines.) He defines the blues formula as a semantic unit comprised of "at least one complete semantic predication" (2006:33). This predication (PN in Taft's abbreviation) is a "complete thought" that consists of a predicate (P) with one or two arguments (A1 and A2). PN typically includes a structure such as A1-P-A2, which in turn generates specific words or phrases, for example, "I (A1) -walked from (P)-Dallas (A2)" (2006:33-6). Taft distinguishes between "x-formulas," which occupy the first half of a blues line, and "r-formulas," which occupy the second half and rhyme with a formula at the end of another line, the two lines forming a couplet as in the standard AAB stanza pattern (2006:36). Thus a couplet could contain four half-line formulas (predications). "The blues formula," he states, "may be defined, therefore, not by its 'metrical demand' but by its placement within the blues line" (2006:35). "The formula is the structural unit," Taft writes (2006:108), and the couplet is "the essential component of the blues" (2006:24).
Taft devotes a chapter to a discussion of the twenty most frequently used blues formulas, giving many examples of variants of these formulas (2006:109-96). From the analysis of these twenty formulas he reaches the conclusion that the main themes of the blues are love, travel, and anxiety (2006:196). In another chapter he analyzes the use of formulas in the blues of Garfield Akers, a Mississippi singer who recorded four blues songs in 1929 and 1930 (2006:197-283). Akers used formulas extensively--one might even say to an extreme degree--but Taft also points out his occasional unique formula variations and original phrases or verses. He studies these four blues in order "to show how the blues singer manipulated the rules of compositional competence outlined in previous chapters" (2006:197) and comes to the conEvans, clusion that "the paradox of a formulaic system is that the singer could be both original and traditional at the same time" (2006:281).
Taft believes that the "constraints and freedoms" of making commercial blues recordings "encouraged, rather than discouraged" the singer-composers' use of formulas (2006:288). He stresses the familiarity of the formulas to the blues audience, which found their use by singers "pleasing" and "stimulating" (2006:302), while the "innovative [i.e., non-formulaic] phrases, by their very presence, enhance the aesthetics of the formula" (2006:307). His final conclusion is that "the major source of authority for the blues formula comes from everyday African American speech" (2006:308).
It is my intention in the following pages to critique many of Taft's findings about formulaic language in commercially recorded blues of the pre-World War II era. In doing so, I will largely follow the order of Taft's discussion outlined above, taking issue with the quality of the lyric transcriptions in his database, his semantic definition of the blues lyric formula, his attempt to separate the study of commercially recorded blues from the study of folk blues, his limitation of the structure of blues lyrics to the lyric formula, his discussion of the reasons why the blues is formulaic, and his conclusions about the relationships of blues lyrics to patterns of everyday African American life and speech. My argument is based on extensive interviews and fieldwork with older blues singers, beginning in 1964, as well as listening to thousands of commercially recorded blues from this era and reading the writings of others on blues. Over the past forty years I have contributed a number of publications dealing with blues formulaic language, structural patterning of texts, literary aesthetics, imagery, the workings of tradition, creativity, and the effects of commercialism (Evans [1966] 1968, 1967, 1971, 1973, 1974, 1976, 1978, 1982, 1987, 1988, 1995, 2001, 2004).
The issues that I discuss here have importance beyond Taft's or my own particular findings about blues lyric formulas. Blues itself is one of the major genres of American folk and popular music, one that has generated a vast critical and explicatory literature over the past hundred years (Ford 1999). Folklorists have been prominent among the writers who have dealt with blues from the early years of the twentieth century on to the present day (e.g., Howard W. Odum, John A. Lomax, W. Prescott Webb, Dorothy Scarborough, Zora Neale Hurston, Alan Lomax, John W. Work, Kenneth S. Goldstein, Harry Oster, William Ferris, Jeff Todd Titon, Barry Lee Pearson, Kip Lornell, Charles K. Wolfe, as well as Taft and myself among many others). They have examined blues as folk literature, music, and social statement and have documented and explained its styles, history, personalities, and contexts. It would thus be fair to say that blues has played a prominent and continuing role in the History of American folklore scholarship. Taft's book draws inspiration from Chomsky's (1965) theories of generative and transformational grammar, which have influenced the work of many other American folklorists, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. Taft is also concerned with the structural analysis of blues lyrics, which makes his work related to another theoretical approach that was especially influential in folklore scholarship in those decades. Taft and I, along with Springer and other writers (Barnie 1978a, 1978b; Jarrett 1978, 1984; Titon 1977) draw many...
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